The 3 P’s: from Pristina to Peja to Prizren

I’m writing to you from Ohrid, a heavenly town set on the Ohrid lake with a very Mediterranean vibe, but let’s first jump back in time to about 8 days ago. After my whirlwind 24 hours in Pristina (see previous blog), it was time to move on to the next destination Peja (actually spelled Pejë in Albanian – most people in Kosovo speak Albanian if I understood correctly and the official languages are Albanian and Serbian). Peja is the third biggest cities in Kosovo, but, unlike Pristina, felt very straightforward, small and almost provincial. It has – in my view – three main tourist attractions: a 13th century UNESCO-listed nunnery, a tiny ethnological museum where a very nice lady with a Dutch brother in law (what are the odds?) gave me a private tour and an old Turkish-style bazar where you can buy mostly new stuff ranging from very big and very shiny gold jewellery to every fake Dior/Gucci/Nike/fill in any other brand-item you might dream off. I, for example, am now the proud owner of a beautiful grey Adidas cap that I needed to buy for a hike. Cost me 5euro and one less sunburn, so great deal.

The nunnery is about 20 minute walk from the city centre along the river bank and is really worth the detour. After the busy bazar and dusty streets of the city, entering the enclosed nunnery feels as a nice escape. All of a sudden all noises are gone and you only have to focus on what’s around you at that moment, enjoy the calm garden and admire the beautiful faded frescoes covering the walls and ceiling inside the church. 

Apart from the bazar, social life in Peja seems to happen around one main square and a couple of surrounding streets that are lined with bars, restaurants, terraces and a lot of the usual phone, shoes and mini market shops. One type of shop did intrigue me however because I had never seen it before: the nuts and seed shop. Kosovars are really into nuts and seeds as a snack apparently, same goes for Macedonians by the way. You can find shops selling all kinds of different nuts and seeds in bulk everywhere, some are just small stalls and others look like really fancy shops, but they only sell nuts and seeds and in some cases they combine it with candy! I’m still carrying half the bag I bought in one those fancier places (I was too intrigued not to enter one) where I almost handpicked every nut and seed I wished to purchase. Sounds expensive, but is absolutely not, but then nothing really is in Kosovo when you come from Western Europe.

The city of Peja is worth a visit, but the main reason I came here was to discover the surrounding mountains and nearby Rugova Valley. Finding a guide for a hike took some effort and creativity; unlike in South-Amerika or South East Asia, tours and travel agencies aren’t advertised for on each street corner and if you want to organise something you have to put some work into it. For a next time in this region, I might consider starting to organise activities that include transport and a little more than walking around town a bit more in advance. Same goes for Macedonia, it all worked out in the end but I was lucky that high season is over and that COVID has impacted the number of tourists coming here.

On Friday morning September 3rd, 8am, Gezim my guide was waiting for me outside my hotel ready to go on a Kosovar alpine adventure. After about an hour drive during which we got to chat about hiking in Kosovo, his different jobs (including mountain guide), what brought me here and life in Kosovo in general, we arrived at the starting point of our tour. We started in a pine forest slowly ascending and continued to chat, so many questions from my side… walk and talk! Probably good for him that it quickly started to become more difficult and I needed each breath to stay alive instead of wasting it on words :-). With each step the trail became rockier, and the landscape opened into beautiful vistas of endless mountain ranges, really breath taking! I guess you could compare it a little with Switzerland (why go al the way to Kosovo then I can hear you ask, but then I would say why go to Switzerland when you can go discover beautiful mountains in Kosovo for a quarter of the price?!) with wide stretches of steep grassy hillsides dotted with little rocks and flowers in company of some good looking cows, could be a real Milka commercial. We continued zigzagging up, stopping a couple of times to catch my breath, take pictures or me sometimes pretending to admire the view to catch my breath (although Gezim was telling me I was doing great and had amazing tempo… good pep talk to keep you going). The last bit to the top was walking along the ridge of the mountain exactly on the border with Montenegro. And there it was, after a climb of about 2,5 hours we reached the peak of mount Hajla at 2403m!! After a high five, the obligatory selfie, extra pictures and some time to look around and have some water it was time to start our descend. That was actually the toughest part, painful on the knees and without walking sticks it’s difficult to keep you balance on a rocky and slippery terrain. We finally made it to our lunch stop, a bench in front of the beautiful chalet built by a friend of Gezim, laying a bit hidden at the foot of the peak and protected by a pine forest. We quietly ate the sandwiches we brought with us admiring the view.

After this well-deserved break, we continued our way down back to the car and went for a ride through the Rugova Valley and visited some mountain villages. When hearing the term ‘mountain villages’ I expected quaint and traditional villages and some had a little of that in them, but most where a gathering of houses in all different styles; more like mushrooms that sprang out of the ground uncontrolled. When I politely mentioned this to Gezim, he told me that it indeed got slightly out of control with city people buying plots of land in the mountains and starting to build their dream villas that don’t always fit in the landscape, to put it mildly (his words, not mine). The government is apparently also trying to put a ban on this mushroom effect by imposing on anyone who wishes to purchase land the obligation to buy 25 acres at once to avoid a lot of small plots being constructed next to each other. Let’s hope this work! A couple of the villages we drove through are also ski resort, so this could be another reason to come visit Kosovo…

In not so short, this was a great day! Beautiful landscape, challenging hike, nice and professional guide and happy Pauline :-).

Last but not least of the cities I visited in Kosovo: Prizren. In all the travel itineraries of Kosovo I had seen, Prizren was always mentioned as the place not to miss and as a bonus for me, it was exactly en route to North Macedonia from Peja so an easy choice for a next stop. I spent one afternoon and one night in Prizren after a bus ride from Peja to Prizren. The bus system is really easy and understandable: you arrive at the bus station, you look at the signs on each bus until you find the name of the place you’re going to, you give your luggage to a ‘bus man’, you enter the bus and pick a seat and then somewhere along the way the ‘bus man’ (not the same as the driver) will come collect the few euro’s you have to pay for the ride, easy!

Prizren is one of the few, and maybe even the only, old cities remaining in Kosovo. The rest has all been destroyed during the war. It’s a small and charming town with visible Turkish influences. A river divides the town into two and you can easily get lost in all the small streets. Along one of the riverbanks lays a pedestrian street with all kinds of restaurants and cafes, but the one thing they have in common is that they all serve kebab, a specialty apparently. I’m not a super big meat eater so I have to admit that although the kebab was good, I preferred the tzatziki-like spread, the pita bread that came hot and grilled out of the oven and the coleslaw slightly better… Apart from having lunch, I spent the afternoon in Prizren looking around town, having coffee and some local sweets, visiting an abandoned fortress to watch the sunset and having dinner during which I tried my first rakia. The latter is not for the faint hearted… super strong alcohol served in a shot glass, but not to be drank as a shot unless you wish to pass out quickly, and usually served at lunch time and not one a empty stomach (at least that’s what I’ve been told). All in all a short but successful visit of Prizren. Next stop is Skopje, North Macedonia!

This sums up my time in Kosovo. Before coming here, I didn’t know anything about Kosovo, I didn’t know anyone from Kosovo (apart from Rita Ora as Grazia magazine told me, but that’s doesn’t really count I guess) or anyone who had been to Kosovo so I had no idea what to expect. I discovered an amazing playground for outdoor activities, strange cities, weird architecture, tormented history, an easy to travel country, cheapest prices in Europe, good food, beautiful landscapes, a positive and future minded vibe, super friendly people who are happy to welcome you and to whom I felt strangely connected, chaos and poverty, a young and hip café/restaurant scene, and the list could go on. A country full of contradictions, but that makes you want to go back. Maybe it’s one of those last corners of Europe where you feel you are on unchartered territory and that can still really surprise you, at least it did surprise me!